Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

10 | Registration and political economy in two hill
villages
Title registration in both the plains villages we considered was initially conflictual.
In each village half of the landowners at the cadastral settlement in the 1930s
would have had difficulty in proving residence or cultivation before 1880. The first
tapu list of Hawwara gives the impression that agriculture relied upon ploughmen
coming in seasonally from other villages. One is left wondering how long any of
the older families had been resident, for affinal ties between the various Shatnawi
and Abu Kirsanna families are not remembered. On the contrary it is ties to other
villages that, for many families, remained important in their social nexus.
When we consider villages of the ‘Ajlun hills overlooking the Jordan Valley and
Palestine, the impression that their agrarian history begins only a little before tapu
registration cannot be sustained. There is a close-knit quality to many villages, a
product of long settlement and much in-marrying over time. Moreover agriculture
seems to be organized differently. There is less social hierarchy; the productive
unit is the simple household of man and wife; every household has land. The
first tapu registers, while no doubt marking a new period in land administration,
appear as synchronic cuts across on-going family and village history.
These differences are apparent from the content of what and who were registered.
The tapu registers of Kufr ‘Awan and Khanzira seem more transparent than those
of Bait Ra’s or Hawwara, as if the process of registration involved little social
exclusion and was not seen as a source of contention – at least by men. Part of
the transparency is because registration was being done by the Special Commission
for the Lands of Hauran. Procedure under the commission was standardized.
There was less room for village residents to exclude cultivators from registration
of their individual shares, as in Bait Ra’s; a person with money and influence in
local government was less able to assert his power over a body of cultivators, as in
Hawwara, and probably less willing too in a part of the district where agriculture
was not commercialized. Government may have carried a different connotation
for villagers further from the centres of power and legitimation.
The villages of Kufr ‘Awan and Khanzira both belong to the Kura nahiye. Their
links were as much with Palestine – with Baisan, Tiberias, and Haifa beyond
– as with Irbid or Damascus. Although alike in many social characteristics, their
records differ. Khanzira lacks surviving records of the 1910 civil register (nüfus)
except for the Christian population, while Kufr ‘Awan lacks a surviving tax list
of 1895. 1 For the smaller Kufr ‘Awan we consider first the general character of
the tapu lists of 1884, particularly partnerships in musha‘ holdings of plough
land, then the formation of village sections, contrasting those implicit in 1884
152